


don't blame it on the kids

by phenomenology



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Missing Scene, Sleepy Conversation, Talking, post ep92, the empire kids bond late at night, the empire kids continue to have my entire fucking heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 17:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22467064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phenomenology/pseuds/phenomenology
Summary: “Beauregard,” Caleb’s voice was quiet at her shoulder, and it was only as she looked towards him (careful not to knock Frumpkin) that she realized her vision was blurred. “You are crying.”"Yeah, I guess I am."[post ep92]
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast, Beauregard Lionett & The Mighty Nein
Comments: 12
Kudos: 254





	don't blame it on the kids

Leaving felt like finally being able to take a clean breath after being stuck inside that house for the duration of their torturous reunion. Her parents were suffocating, the décor was suffocating, and their false kindness and hollow apologies were suffocating. Beau had come so, so close to losing her shit, to just snapping and tearing everything inside those rooms apart. Her friends at her back and her side had been helpful in presence. While she selfishly wished just a little that they had spoken up on her behalf before she started crying, she didn’t fault them for being out of their depth. The majority of them came from broken families; they didn’t have experience with how to react when parents started humiliating their child in front of other people.

Releasing her friends from the hug she had pulled them into, Beau wiped at her eyes as subtly as possible and cracked a self-deprecating grin she hoped passed as cocky, gesturing for them to follow her.

“Let’s get out of this hell hole. We’ve got a witch to find.”

As they walked – not towards town but instead out towards the mountains – Beau let herself fall in at the back of the group, Jester and her spell leading the way. It wasn’t raining too hard anymore. Instead, it was more of a fine, never-ending mist. Beau tipped her face skyward and closed her eyes, let it wash over her and pretended it could hide her tears and wash away the evidence of how incapable she was of facing her parents.

They walked for a while longer before it got too dark and Fjord made the executive decision to set up camp for the night. Caleb set up the bubble at the base of a half dead tree, part of the trunk inside, meticulous as always. Beau flopped down at the outer edges with her back against the tree, waving off the others’ offers to take watch in her stead. She told them that she didn’t feel like sleeping yet, didn’t mind staying up for a little while.

She found herself not surprised in the least when twenty minutes later, everyone else was asleep and Caleb stood to pick his way over them and plop down at her side. He didn’t say anything, but Frumpkin the raven suddenly appeared on his arm in a strange blink of the eye trick. He took a moment to scratch two fingers against the back of the bird’s neck before Frumpkin hopped his way over to perch on Beau’s shoulder. The bird settled comfortably against the side of her head and uttered a low crooning sound. His feathers were warm and soft as he shifted, the raven making another quiet croon before going silent.

They sat like that for a while, Beau not watching their surroundings but instead switching between staring out to the middle distance and flitting her gaze over their sleeping companions. Caduceus’ rumbling snores were a little quieter than usual tonight, more like distant thunder than a storm directly overhead. Yasha seemed content sleeping beside him, and Beau’s lips quirked at the corner as she looked over them. Fjord had taken up position on the opposite side of the bubble, a barrier between anything outside and the rest of their friends. Nott was curled into the space near the curve of his stomach, not touching but clearly taking comfort in presence. Jester had somehow smushed her way rather creatively into the narrow space between Yasha and Nott, snoozing quite soundly as she splayed across the ground.

Everything about the atmosphere inside this little dome radiated with content, and Beau had never been so happy as to revel in it than she was right now.

_This_ was home. _This_ was her family.

“Beauregard,” Caleb’s voice was quiet at her shoulder, and it was only as she looked towards him (careful not to knock Frumpkin) that she realized her vision was blurred. “You are crying.”

She almost pulled out that former excuse, almost said “hayfever” or “allergies”, but something stopped her. Something about the lack of judgment in Caleb’s eyes, something in the set of his mouth, forced the honesty out of her in that moment.

“Yeah, I guess I am.” She let out a very soft breathy huff of a laugh, low and humorless. Reaching up to wipe her cheeks clean with a little more force than strictly necessary, Beau looked away from Caleb and tried to take a steady breath.

“I uhm…I cannot…say that-that I understand, because I do not,” Caleb fumbled heavily through his words, blatantly uncertain of where to place his feet so as not to step on a landmine. Beau stayed quiet and let him try to navigate whatever he was attempting to say. She had learned through experience that it was better to let him parse his thoughts out, to slowly untangle what he wanted to convey and usually find the correct phrase along the way.

“But I want you to know, we – all of us – are here for you. We obviously do not know…everything. That you have been through. But I for one…I do not wish to watch you suffer through this by yourself.”

Beau stayed quiet for a while longer, eventually reaching up to bury her fingers in the soft feathers at Frumpkin’s neck, earning a quiet noise from the raven at the gesture. Eventually though, she burrowed her way out from behind the walls she had built up and up and up and up and went to greet Caleb for his efforts.

“I never wanted to come back here,” Beau whispered, afraid to lift her voice above that volume for fear of being heard. “I wanted to put this place behind me, forget that I had family here that didn’t want me and move on. I wanted to erase the memory of my dad slapping me across the face the night the Cobalt Soul took me away, to burn the letter my mother sent me; to never have to see TJ’s face because I knew I’d look into those big, innocent eyes and want to keep him safe. But…here I am.”

Frumpkin pressed a little more into Beau’s absent scratching and she met the gesture with a little more attention to her ministrations. Caleb remained quiet and present, solid and reassuring, at her side.

“Do you think I should forgive them?” Beau eventually asked the silence around them, eyes on Jester’s splayed sleeping form. “My parents?”

“You are asking someone who…you know what I did to my parents. I would give… _anything_ to have more time with them. But for you, as I said, I don’t know everything that has happened between you and them, so I don’t think I can necessarily tell you what the right answer is here.”

It was kind of the answer she was expecting, but it still didn’t help. Beau felt more lost and useless than ever.

“But…I can say,” Caleb continued suddenly, and Beau glanced sideways at the wizard, mildly surprised. “You do not seem…happy with them. And from what I gathered, they were justifying – poorly – mistakes they made and trying to blame you for reacting as you did. Which I can tell you is wrong on their end. You should not be blamed for doing what you did in a bad, complicated situation. Especially since you were more a child at the time.”

She wasn’t sure how to reply to all of that. Somewhere, tangled messily with the younger version of herself that believed everything that had happened was her fault, the logical version of Beau was calling out that Caleb was right. The Beau she had cultivated on the road, the one she had wanted to become when she was years younger and full of hope for a life of adventure that would expand her family’s profit; that Beau was shouting at the top of her lungs that Caleb had hit the nail on the head.

“But,” and this was the weakest version of herself speaking, the child that had taken to heart the fact that her father and mother had paid to have her dragged out of their home while expecting her replacement. “Maybe if I had just listened…and done what they asked, things would have been better and I could have made them proud. Maybe they wouldn’t hate me.”

“Well,” Caleb’s thick accent drew her back, Beau blinking the family around her back into focus, banishing the imagined faces of loving parents from behind her eyelids. “I would hate to think where we would be…without you.”

Abruptly, Beau remembered the words she had spoken to Fjord back in the tavern a few days prior. She was scared of facing her past because it was a past that didn’t include the Mighty Nein…and that she was happy here, like this. That she was scared of losing that happiness.

This was why.

She had been back in that god damn house for less than two hours and she was already trying to place the blame on herself, to maybe reason a way into fixing what had never been whole. In the year she had spent alongside this band of misfits, they had given her more than her parents ever had.

“Jester said she thought…that my dad wasn’t lying about caring about me. But I don’t believe her, not really. I just think he’s convinced himself that everything that happened three years ago was in no way his fault. I think he believes that he’s blameless…and I’m not ready to forgive him.”

She looked over at Caleb, kept her fingers buried in the warm, soft feathers of Frumpkin’s neck and took a tremulous breath.

“I don’t know if I ever will.”

Caleb met her with a steady look, and a firm nod. It wasn’t agreement, and it wasn’t disagreement. It was approval for a choice that Beau had made on her own, it was a reassurance that he would support her no matter what choice she decided to make in the end. He would not tell her what to do – none of them would. But they would stand at her back and Caleb would return the favor she so often granted. Caleb would give his shoulder for her to grab onto if she needed a crutch to steady herself on, a reminder that she wasn’t by herself in any of this.

Beau was so tired of crying, so drained from digging up emotions that she rarely ever let see the light of day. Despite this, her eyes stung with tears that lingered there and didn’t fall. She was too exhausted to cry for real now.

Caleb, in a rare display of physical affection, reached out, gently shooed Frumpkin off Beau’s shoulder and into the monk’s lap. He placed his arm around her shoulders, occupying the space Frumpkin had just been in with a steady hand, drawing her into his side. Beau went willingly, leaning into reassurance offered so unconditionally from someone who believed so whole-heartedly in the goodness inside of her.

This was reminiscent of their post-battle ritual, commiserating their wounds and finding solidity in the fact that they had managed to survive once again. In a way, Beau supposed that this was technically post-battle – one she had had to fight on her own. Caleb was offering her a second layer of protection, tucked into his shoulder inside the bubble. He was letting her take her time to lick her wounds and feel a little miserable before they continued on towards their goal in the morning.

Sniffling against the pressure of a cry-induced stuffed nose, Beau’s eyelids drooped with exhaustion. She tucked herself a little more securely against Caleb’s side and wrapped a careful had around Frumpkin in her lap. Tension unwound so rapidly from her muscles at the foreign feeling of total safety that Beau felt a little off kilter. But she was too tired to dwell on it.

“I am…sorry. By the way,” Caleb murmured, his mouth near her hairline as he tipped his temple against the top of her head. His fingers tightened a little around her shoulder as he apologized, and Beau hummed with sleepy confusion, brow crinkling slightly as she fought to stay awake.

“What for?” she whispered in return, petting her fingers against Frumpkin’s wing.

“For asking you to come back here in the first place. I know I often tend to put Nott above everyone else, but I never should have asked this of you.”

Caleb’s voice was tight with guilt, and Beau found herself drifting back to a few days prior, when the wizard had asked if she would do this for their friend. Not _his_ friend, _their_ friend. Maybe he thought it was selfish (and maybe it was), but Beau knew that this had to happen eventually, and she would stand by Nott through anything. Even through facing her family.

She thought of Nott happily popping open an expensive bottle of her family’s wine to spite her parents, of a sharp grin full of teeth and a lie meant to terrify her father. She thought of clattering cups and a jade rabbit statue sitting pretty in Nott’s little hands. Beau remembered that night at the tavern, their ridiculous conversation about crushes, and Nott proudly proclaiming everything her little Luc was good at, like any decent mother would.

“If I knew this all would have happened when you asked, I would still say yes,” Beau murmured after the silence stretched between them. “Nott is my friend too, and this is an important lead for her. You didn’t do anything wrong, Caleb.”

Seemingly not knowing how to respond to her lack of anger towards him, something he had clearly expected, the wizard remained silent. He wrapped his arm with firmer intent around her shoulders. Beau hummed quietly again, finally letting her eyes flutter shut for the night. She had never felt safer in her life.

“Thank you,” she muttered, hoping her words were still coherent enough for him to understand as she dropped off to dreamless sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> yet again, we are unsurprised to see the author posting another story about how much the empire siblings have my ENTIRE heart
> 
> **EDITED 2/7/21


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